Last meals? How corporate power taints safety rules
"[P]roducing safe food is not impossibly difficult," writes Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, in "Safe Food, " the companion to her critically praised "Food Politics." But if it's so easy,
then why are 76 million of us getting sick, 325,000 becoming hospitalized and 5,000 dying every year from unsafe food?
A one-agency solution to protect food supply
Protecting the U.S. food supply against bioterrorist attacks would be simple, says Marion Nestle, chair of the Nutrition and Food Studies department at New York University and author of the newly released book Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. It merely requires doing what expert government panels have advocated for more than a dozen years: creating one unified agency that protects the food supply from farm to table, rather than the Byzantine tangle of agencies that now oversee the nation's food in bits and pieces.
UNAPPROVED MEAT ENTERED U.S.
From 1999 to 2001, the USDA allowed in 823,632 pounds of meat from foreign plants that may have been prohibited from trading with the U.S. According to a recent report by the USDA's inspector general, 66,299 pounds of the meat was from processors unapproved for shipping it to this country. Some of the questionable meat came from countries that had outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001. The Food Safety and Inspection (FSIS) administrator couldn't say where hundreds of thousands of pounds of the meat came from because the agency only keeps records for the current and two previous years.
Deaths from Food Poisoning Underestimated
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about 5,200 people die in the U.S. each year from food poisoning. However, according to Danish researchers, the true figure could be twice as high. They believe the underestimate is due to the little long-term data that is available. Food poisoning, such as by salmonella and campylobacter, are considered acute infections with mortalities usually occurring within 30 days of infection. The researchers found that death can actually result up to a year after infection. Death from food poisoning may also be wrongly attributed to other causes.
April 14, 2003
Live hens were put into wood chippers
VALLEY CENTER – The owners of two ranches where employees fed thousands of live chickens into wood chippers will not face animal cruelty charges, the District Attorney's Office announced yesterday.
April 04, 2003
Tips for the lazy vegetarian
A couple of years ago in this column, I revealed my status as a "lazy vegetarian." At the time, I assured readers that going meatless was easier than most people think because a slew of delicious and healthful convenience foods makes it as easy as popping a TV dinner into the microwave.
Catering to Change
Vegan restaurants are thriving in the black community as people seek a more healthful lifestyle...
Pork -- it's what's for Purim
Pork is non-kosher par excellence and, I argue, the perfect food for the upcoming celebration of Purim. Forget those triangular hamantaschen cookies. Whether you keep kosher or eat everything, I suggest that this Purim, Jews should start eating kosher pork instead of chicken, fish, or beef.
April 02, 2003
Quiet activist Emily the Cow will rest in Peace Abbey
SHERBORN -- Eight years after escaping a Hopkinton slaughterhouse, Emily the Cow, an inarticulate but persuasive spokeswoman for vegetarianism, died in her sleep early Sunday of uterine cancer. She was 10.
